1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile telecommunications system, and more particularly to a method for displaying caller information using image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
A code division multiple access (referred to hereinafter as CDMA) system, one of several mobile telecommunications systems, is classified into two types, a synchronous mode system and an asynchronous mode system. A description will hereinafter be given of a wide-band code division multiple access (referred to hereinafter as W-CDMA) communication system associated with an asynchronous UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), which is a next-generation mobile telecommunications system. However, the present invention is not limited to the W-CDMA communication system. Needless to say, the present invention could be applied to CDMA-based mobile telecommunications systems of other types, such as CDMA 2000.
With the advent of sophisticated modern society, the mobile telecommunications systems have been rapidly developed on the basis of personal information communication systems. User elements such as pagers, mobile stations and the like have rapidly come into wide use at a low cost according to the development of the mobile telecommunications systems. With a rapid increase in the use of mobile telephones, users of the mobile telephones are provided with various convenient services, for example, a short message service (SMS) and caller information display service. However, the caller information display service restrictively offers a service simply displaying a caller identification (ID) which is a telephone number of a caller, i.e. a user of a transmitting party. Therefore, a user of a receiving party can identify information about the transmitting user only by viewing the caller ID, thereby causing the receiving user to be provided with limited information about the transmitting user.
The SMS enables a transmitting party to transmit a message to a receiving party regardless of the status of the receiving party, e.g. in cases where the receiving party is in a call connection state or where it is impossible to trace the location of the receiving party. Besides, it is possible to provide the service at a low cost compared to voice communications. However, the SMS only offers a service for transmitting short character messages, which is a point-to-point service, so it is impossible to fully satisfy desires, e.g. a desire for transmission of image data, of next-generation mobile telecommunications system users. In other words, the SMS can only transmit short character data, so it is impossible to transmit data exceeding a fixed size, e.g. mass data such as image data, to the receiving party. Consequently, there is a problem in that data to be transmitted is limited in size.